2009年12月26日 星期六

Is there any room at the inn?Conrad Hilton answered yes to that question, and became one of the world's wealthiest men. When he was a child, Hilton helped his father welcome business travelers to the rooms they had set up in their home in San Antonio. He learned well what the travelers were looking for in a temporary home. In 1919, Hilton bought his first hotel and several years later he opened his first Hilton Hotel, the Dallas Hilton. America's first coast-to-coast hotel chain opened inns overseas in the 1940s. Conrad Hilton was born on December 25, 1887.

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"Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don't quit." — Conrad Hilton

In receiving the Nobel Prize in 1970, Mr. Samuelson was credited with transforming his discipline from one that ruminates about economic issues to one that solves problems, answering questions about cause and effect with mathematical rigor and clarity.

When economists “sit down with a piece of paper to calculate or analyze something, you would have to say that no one was more important in providing the tools they use and the ideas that they employ than Paul Samuelson,” said Robert M. Solow, a fellow Nobel laureate and colleague of Mr. Samuelson’s at M.I.T.

Mr. Samuelson attracted a brilliant roster of economists to teach or study at the university, among them Mr. Solow as well as others who would go on to become Nobel laureates like George A. Akerlof, Robert F. Engle III, Lawrence R. Klein, Paul Krugman, Franco Modigliani, Robert C. Merton and Joseph E. Stiglitz.

Mr. Samuelson wrote one of the most widely used college textbooks in the history of American education. The book, “Economics,” first published in 1948, was the nation’s best-selling textbook for nearly 30 years. Translated into 20 languages, it was selling 50,000 copies a year a half century after it first appeared.

“I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws — or crafts its advanced treatises — if I can write its economics textbooks,” Mr. Samuelson said.

His textbook taught college students how to think about economics. His technical work — especially his discipline-shattering Ph.D. thesis, immodestly titled “The Foundations of Economic Analysis” — taught professional economists how to ply their trade. Between the two books, Mr. Samuelson redefined modern economics.

The textbook introduced generations of students to the revolutionary ideas of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist who in the 1930s developed the theory that modern market economies could become trapped in depression and would then need a strong push from government spending or tax cuts, in addition to lenient monetary policy, to restore them. Many economics students would never again rest comfortably with the 19th-century view that private markets would cure unemployment without need of government intervention.

That lesson was reinforced in 2008, when the international economy slipped into the steepest downturn since the Great Depression, when Keynesian economics was born. When the Depression began, governments stood pat or made matters worse by trying to balance fiscal budgets and erecting trade barriers. But 80 years later, having absorbed the Keynesian teaching of Mr. Samuelson and his followers, most industrialized countries took corrective action, raising government spending, cutting taxes, keeping exports and imports flowing and driving short-term interest rates to near zero.

Lessons for Kennedy

Mr. Samuelson explained Keynesian economics to American presidents, world leaders, members of Congress and the Federal Reserve Board, not to mention other economists. He was a consultant to the United States Treasury, the Bureau of the Budget and the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.

His most influential student was John F. Kennedy, whose first 40-minute class with Mr. Samuelson, after the 1960 election, was conducted on a rock by the beach at the family compound at Hyannis Port, Mass. Before class, there was lunch with politicians and Cambridge intellectuals aboard a yacht offshore. “I had expected a scrumptious meal,” Mr. Samuelson said. “We had franks and beans.”

As a member of the Kennedy campaign brain trust, Mr. Samuelson headed an economic task force for the candidate and held several private sessions on economics with him. Many would have a bearing on decisions made during the Kennedy administration.

Though Mr. Samuelson was President Kennedy’s first choice to become chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, he refused, on principle, to take any government office because, he said, he did not want to put himself in a position in which he could not say and write what he believed.

After the 1960 election, he told the young president-elect that the nation was heading into a recession and that Kennedy should push through a tax cut to head it off. Kennedy was shocked.

“I’ve just campaigned on a platform of fiscal responsibility and balanced budgets and here you are telling me that the first thing I should do in office is to cut taxes?” Mr. Samuelson recalled, quoting the president.

Kennedy eventually accepted the professor’s advice and signaled his willingness to cut taxes, but he was assassinated before he could take action. His successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, carried out the plan, however, and the economy bounced back.

Adding Bite to Academia

In the classroom, Mr. Samuelson was a lively, funny, articulate teacher. On theories that he and others had developed to show links between the performance of the stock market and the general economy, he famously said: “It is indeed true that the stock market can forecast the business cycle. The stock market has called nine of the last five recessions.”

His speeches and his voluminous writing had a lucidity and bite not usually found in academic technicians. He tried to give his economic pronouncements a “snap at the end,” he said, “like Mark Twain.” When women began complaining about career and salary inequities, for example, he said in their defense, “Women are men without money.”

Remarkably versatile, Mr. Samuelson reshaped academic thinking about nearly every economic subject, from what Marx could have meant by a labor theory of value to whether stock prices fluctuate randomly. Mathematics had already been employed by social scientists, but Mr. Samuelson brought the discipline into the mainstream of economic thinking, showing how to derive strong theoretical predictions from simple mathematical assumptions.

His early work, for example, presented a unified mathematical structure for predicting how businesses and households alike would respond to changes in economic forces, how changes in wage rates would affect employment, and how tax rate changes would affect tax collections.

His relentless application of mathematical analysis gave rise to an astonishing number of groundbreaking theorems, resolving debates that had raged among theorists for decades, if not centuries.

An Economic Theorem

Early in his career, Mr. Samuelson developed the rudimentary mathematics of business cycles with a model, called the multiplier-accelerator, that captured the inherent tendency of market economies to fluctuate.

The model showed how markets magnify the impact of outside shocks and turn, say, an initial one dollar increase in foreign investment into a several dollar increase in total domestic income, to be followed by a decline.

Mr. Samuelson provided a mathematical structure to study the impact of trade on different groups of consumers and workers. In a famous theorem, known as Stolper-Samuelson, he and a co-author showed that competition from imports of clothes and similar goods from underdeveloped countries, where producers rely on unskilled workers, could drive down the wages of low-paid workers in industrialized countries.

The theorem provided the intellectual scaffold for opponents of free trade. And late in his career, Mr. Samuelson set off an intellectual commotion by pointing out that the economy of a country like the United States could be hurt if productivity rose among the economies with which it traded.

Yet Mr. Samuelson, like most academic economists, remained an advocate of open trade. Trade, he taught, raises average living standards enough to allow the workers and consumers who benefit to compensate those who suffer, and still have some extra income left over. Protectionism would not help, but higher productivity would.

Mr. Samuelson also formulated a theory of public goods — that is, goods that can be provided effectively only through collective, or government, action. National defense is one such public good. It is nonexclusive; the Navy, for example, exists to protect every citizen. It also eliminates rivalry among its many consumers; that is, the amount of security that any one citizen derives from the Navy subtracts nothing from the amount of security that any other citizen derives.

The features of public goods, Mr. Samuelson taught, stand in direct contrast to those of ordinary goods, like apples. An apple eaten by one consumer is not available to any other. Public goods, he concluded, cannot be sold in private markets because individuals have no incentive to pay for them voluntarily. Instead they hope to get a free ride from the decisions of others to make the public goods available.

A Predictive Principle

Mr. Samuelson pushed mathematical analysis to new levels of sophistication. For example, economists routinely write mathematical models of market economies that assume consumers and producers make choices to maximize their well-being. The question arises when such economies are stable: if disturbed by, say, droughts or wars or technological change, will the economy return to appropriate levels of prices and output or, instead, fly out of control? What Mr. Samuelson’s “correspondence principle” shows is the theoretical link between the behavior of individuals and the aggregate stability of the entire economic system. Information about individual responses, Mr. Samuelson’s theorem holds, shapes predictions about overall economic stability.

He analyzed the evolution of economies with a mathematical model, called an overlapping generations model, that scholars have since used to study, for example, the functioning over time of the Social Security system and the management of public debt.

He also helped develop linear programming, a mathematical tool used by corporations and central planners in socialist countries to calculate how to produce pre-set levels of various goods and services at the least cost.

Late in his career, Mr. Samuelson laid out the mathematics of stock price movements, an analysis that became the basis for Nobel Prize-winning research by his student Mr. Merton and Myron S. Scholes. They designed formulas that Wall Street analysts use to trade options and other complicated securities known as derivatives.

But beyond his astonishing array of scientific theorems and conclusions, Mr. Samuelson wedded Keynesian thought to conventional economics. He developed what he called the Neoclassical Synthesis. The neoclassical economists in the late 19th century showed how forces of supply and demand generate equilibrium in the market for apples, shoes and all other consumer goods and services. The standard analysis had held that market economies, left to their own devices, gravitated naturally toward full employment.

Economists clung to this theory even in the wake of the Depression of the 1930s. But the need to explain the market collapse, as well as unemployment rates that soared to 25 percent, gave rise to a contrary strain of thought associated with Keynes.

Mr. Samuelson’s resulting “synthesis” amounted to the notion that economists could use the neoclassical apparatus to analyze economies operating near full employment, but switch over to Keynesian analysis when the economy turned sour.

Midwestern Roots

Paul Anthony Samuelson was born on May 15, 1915, in Gary, Ind., the son of Frank Samuelson, a pharmacist, and the former Ella Lipton. His family, he said, was “made up of upwardly mobile Jewish immigrants from Poland who had prospered considerably in World War I, because Gary was a brand new steel town when my family went there.”

But after his father lost much of his money in the years after the war, the family moved to Chicago. Young Paul attended Hyde Park High School, where as a freshman he began studying the stock market. At one point he helped his algebra teacher select stocks to buy in the boom of the 1920s.

“Hupp Motors and other losers,” he remembered in an interview in 1996. “Proof of the fallibility of systems,” he said.

He left high school at age 16 to enter the University of Chicago. “I was born as an economist on Jan. 2, 1932,” he said. That was the day he heard his first college lecture, on Thomas Malthus, the 18th-century British economist who studied the relation between poverty and population growth. Hooked, he began taking economics courses.

The University of Chicago developed the century’s leading conservative economic theorists, under the later guidance of Milton Friedman. But Mr. Samuelson regarded the teaching at Chicago as “schizophrenic.” This was at the height of the Depression, and courses about the business cycle naturally talked about unemployment, he said. But in economic-theory classes, joblessness was not mentioned.

“The niceties of existence were not a matter of concern,” he recalled, “yet everything around was closed down most of the time. If you lived in a middle-class community in Chicago, children and adults came daily to the door saying, ‘We are starving, how about a potato?’ I speak from poignant memory.”

After receiving his bachelor’s degree from Chicago in 1935, he went to Harvard, where he was attracted to the ideas of the Harvard professor Alvin Hansen, the leading exponent of Keynesian theory in America.

As a student at Chicago and later at Cambridge, Mr. Samuelson had at first reacted negatively to Keynes. “What I resisted most was the notion that there could be equilibrium unemployment” — that some level of unemployment would be impossible to eliminate and have to be tolerated. “I spent four summers of my college career on the beach at Lake Michigan,” he said. “It was pointless to look for work. I didn’t even have to test the market because I had friends who would go to 350 potential employers and not be able to get any job at all.”

Eventually he was converted. “Why do I want to refuse a paradigm that enables me to understand the Roosevelt upturn from 1933 to 1937?” he asked himself.

Mr. Samuelson was perceived at the outset of his career as a brilliant mathematical economist. He shot to academic fame as a 22-year-old prodigy at Harvard when he began a boldly sweeping and highly technical doctoral dissertation, published as a book in 1947 by Harvard University Press.

At Harvard, as at Chicago, he was not shy about criticizing his professors — “respecting neither age nor rank,” according to James Tobin, a Nobel laureate of Yale University. The young Mr. Samuelson’s chief complaint against economists was that they preoccupied themselves with finer economic principles while all around them people were being thrown into bread lines.

A Bold Dissertation

His attitudes did not endear him to the austere chairman of the economics department at Harvard, Harold Hitchings Burbank, with whom he had a rocky relationship.

But the publication of his dissertation was an immediate success. It won him the John Bates Clark Medal awarded by the American Economic Association to the economist showing the most scholarly promise before the age of 40; it would eventually help him win his Nobel, and it was frequently reprinted despite the heavy resistance of Professor Burbank, selling to economists around the world for more than 20 years. (“Sweet revenge,” Mr. Samuelson said.)

Among Mr. Samuelson’s fellow students was Marion Crawford. They married in 1938. Mr. Samuelson earned his master’s degree from Harvard in 1936 and a Ph.D. in 1941. He wrote his thesis from 1937 to 1940 as a member of the prestigious Harvard Society of Junior Fellows. In 1940, Harvard offered him an instructorship, which he accepted, but a month later M.I.T. invited him to become an assistant professor.

Harvard made no attempt to keep him, even though he had by then developed an international following. Mr. Solow said of the Harvard economics department at the time: “You could be disqualified for a job if you were either smart or Jewish or Keynesian. So what chance did this smart, Jewish, Keynesian have?”

During World War II, Mr. Samuelson worked in M.I.T.’s Radiation Laboratory, developing computers for tracking aircraft, and was a consultant for the War Production Board. After the war, having resumed teaching, he and his wife started a family. When she became pregnant the fourth time, she gave birth to triplets, all boys.

Marion Samuelson died in 1978. Mr. Samuelson is survived by his second wife, Risha Clay Samuelson; six children from his first marriage: Jane Raybould, Margaret Crawford-Samuelson, William and the triplet sons, Robert, John and Paul; and 15 grandchildren. Mr. Samuelson is also survived by a brother, Robert Summers, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Pennsylvania and father of Lawrence H. Summers, director of President Obama’s National Economic Council and former secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton and former president of Harvard.

A Keynesian Textbook

The birth of the triplets doubled the number of children in the Samuelson household, which soon found itself sending 350 diapers to the laundry each week. His friends suggested that Mr. Samuelson needed to write a book to earn more money.

He decided to write an economics textbook, but one that would not only be compelling for students but also sophisticated and comprehensive. And he wanted to center it on the still poorly understood Keynesian revolution. President Herbert Hoover, he noted, had never referred to Keynes other than as “the Marxist Keynes.”

“I never quite understood that venom,” Mr. Samuelson said.

He said he “sweated blood” writing his book, employing detailed charts, color graphics and humor. He wrote: “Economists are said to disagree too much but in ways that are too much alike: If eight sleep in the same bed, you can be sure that, like Eskimos, when they turn over, they’ll all turn over together.”

It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of “Economics.” Business Week, taking note of the textbook’s publication in Greek, Punjabi, Hebrew, Russian, Serbo-Croatian and other languages, once said that it had “gone a long way in giving the world a common economic language.” Students were attracted to its lively prose and relevance to their everyday lives. Many textbook authors began to copy its presentation.

“Economics,” together with shrewd investing, made Mr. Samuelson a millionaire many times over.

Friendship With a Rival

A historian could well tell the story of 20th-century public debate over economic policy in America through the jousting between Mr. Samuelson and Milton Friedman, who won the Nobel in 1976. Mr. Samuelson said the two had almost always disagreed with each other but had remained friends. They met in 1933 at the University of Chicago, when Mr. Samuelson was an undergraduate and Mr. Friedman a graduate student.

Unlike the liberal Mr. Samuelson, the conservative Mr. Friedman opposed active government participation in most areas of the economy except national defense and law enforcement. He thought private enterprise and competition could do better and that government controls posed risks to individual freedoms.

Both men were fluid speakers as well as writers, and they debated often in public forums, in testimony before Congressional committees, in op-ed articles and in columns each of them wrote for Newsweek magazine. But Mr. Samuelson said he always had fear in his heart when he prepared for combat with Mr. Friedman, a formidably engaging debater.

“If you looked at a transcript afterward, it might seem clear that you had won the debate on points,” he said. “But somehow, with members of the audience, you always seemed to come off as elite, and Milton seemed to have won the day.”

Mr. Samuelson said he had never regarded Keynesianism as a religion, and he criticized some of his liberal colleagues for seeming to do so, earning himself, late in life, the label “l’enfant terrible emeritus.” The experience of nations in the second half of the century, he said, had diminished his optimism about the ability of government to perform miracles.

If government gets too big, and too great a portion of the nation’s income passes through it, he said, government becomes inefficient and unresponsive to the human needs “we do-gooders extol,” and thus risks infringing on freedoms.

But, he said, no serious political or economic thinker would reject the fundamental Keynesian idea that a benevolent democratic government must do what it can to avert economic trouble in areas the free markets cannot. Neither government alone nor the markets alone, he said, could serve the public welfare without help from the other.

As nations became locked in global competition, and as the computerization of the workplace created daunting employment problems, he agreed with the economic conservatives in advocating that American corporations must stay lean and efficient and follow the general dictates of the free market.

But he warned that the harshness of the marketplace had to be tempered and that corporate downsizing and the reduction of government programs “must be done with a heart.”

Despite his celebrated accomplishments, Mr. Samuelson preached and practiced humility. The M.I.T. economics department became famous for collegiality, in no small part because no one else could play prima donna if Mr. Samuelson refused the role, and, of course, he did. Economists, he told his students, as Churchill said of political colleagues, “have much to be humble about.”

Paul A. Samuelson, whose analytical work laid the foundation for modern economics, died Sunday. He was 94.

Mr. Samuelson, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in economics and the author of one of the most-ubiquitous college textbooks ever, was 'one of the greatest teachers that economics has ever known' and 'a titan of economics,' according to Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke.

'Paul Samuelson was both a pathbreaking and prolific economic theorist,' said Mr. Bernanke, a former student of Mr. Samuelson's at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Actively publishing into the 2000s, Mr. Samuelson's career in economics spanned eight decades. As a high school student in 1932, he wandered into an economics lecture at the University of Chicago and was enamored. But attending Chicago as an undergraduate during the Great Depression, he became acutely aware, he said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal earlier this year, of the differences between what was being taught in the classroom and 'what I heard out the windows and I heard from the street.'

In 1935 he went, despite his Chicago professors' protestations, to Harvard University for his graduate work. His 1941 PhD thesis, later published as 'Foundations of Economic Analysis,' examined the mathematical structure underlying economics. The approach revolutionized the field, to the point where economists today are often consumed with finding mathematical proofs for their theories.

'For me, it is a special bereavement,' said Princeton University economist Avinash Dixit. 'My whole style of research, and the techniques that support almost all of my own papers, derive from his foundational articles.'

Mr. Samuelson started teaching at MIT in 1940, the beginning of a lifelong association with the university that helped its economics program become the most highly-regarded in the world. Through his 'Economics' textbook, first published in 1948 and for years the most widely used college textbook on any topic, his analytical approach became the standard for undergraduate courses. It also introduced the work of John Maynard Keynes into the college curriculum. Now in its 19th edition, it is still popular. Mr. Bernanke keeps a copy signed by Mr. Samuelson on the shelves in his office at the Fed.

'There's just an enormous amount of what every undergraduate learns that we take for granted that Paul played an absolutely critical role in codifying and uncovering,' said MIT economist and National Bureau of Economic Research president James Poterba, who remembers carrying around Mr. Samuelson's textbook as a high school student. 'It's like trying to envision how did people do mechanics before Newton.'

In 1970, Mr. Samuelson was the first American to win the Nobel Prize in economics, the second year the prize was offered. 'Samuelson's contribution has been that, more than any other contemporary economist, he has contributed to raising the general analytical and methodological level in economic science,' wrote the Nobel prize committee. 'He has in fact simply rewritten considerable parts of economic theory.'

Mr. Samuelson, a lifelong Democrat, acted as an adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, though he refused to take an official position in government.

Mr. Samuelson hailed from a family of well-known economists, including brother Robert Summers, sister-in-law Anita Summers and nephew Lawrence Summers.

'Above all else, Paul Samuelson was a scholar,' Lawrence Summers, who runs President Obama's National Economic Council, said Sunday. 'He used to proudly remark that he had never spent a full week in Washington. But through his research, teaching, and writing he had more impact on the economic life of this country and the world than any government economic official and many presidents.'

Mr. Samuelson, in a March interview with The Wall Street Journal, took aim at those trying to quell the financial crisis. 'The typical pundit today would be somebody who might have been my student at MIT 25 years ago. I have great admiration for Ben Bernanke. But having been born in 1956 he did not have a feel for what it was like. If you were born after 1950, you really don't have the feel of that Great Depression in your bones,' he said. 'Being a bright boy at MIT, it's not really a substitute for that.'

Indeed, MIT PhDs now dominate the profession and hold many high positions in government, including Mr. Bernanke and Christina Romer, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers.

This collection brings together the best of Warren Bennis--essays spanning three decades and covering such revolutions as the information explosion, Watergate, the emergence of Japan, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. A retrospective on the life and work of one of America's most respected authorities on business leadership.由 Warren G Bennis 著作 - 1994 - 258 頁books.google.com - 關於此書 - 更多書籍結果 »

Warren Gamaliel Bennis (born March 8, 1925) is an American scholar, organizational consultant and author, widely regarded as a pioneer of the contemporary field of Leadership studies. [1][2] Bennis is University Professor and Distinguished Professor of Business Administration and Founding Chairman of The Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California. [3]

“His work at MIT in the 1960s on group behavior foreshadowed -- and helped bring about -- today's headlong plunge into less hierarchical, more democratic and adaptive institutions, private and public,” management expert Tom Peters wrote in 1993 in the foreword to Bennis’ An Invented Life: Reflections on Leadership and Change. [1]

Management expert James O’Toole, in a 2005 issue of Compass, published by Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, claimed that Bennis developed “an interest in a then-nonexistent field that he would ultimately make his own -- leadership -- with the publication of his ‘Revisionist Theory of Leadership’ in Harvard Business Review in 1961.” [4] O’Toole observed that Bennis challenged the prevailing wisdom by showing that humanistic, democratic-style leaders better suited to dealing with the complexity and change that characterize the leadership environment. [5]

Contents

Military Service & Education

Bennis grew up within a working-class Jewish family in Westwood, New Jersey, before enlisting in 1943 in the United States Army. He would go on to serve as one of the Army’s youngest infantry officers in the European theater of operations, and was awarded the Purple Heart and Bronze Star. [6]

He enrolled in Antioch College in 1947 following his military service. Antioch president Douglas McGregor, considered one of the founders of the modern democratic management philosophy, would take on Bennis as a protégé, a scholarly relationship that would prove fruitful when both later served as professors at the MIT Sloan School of Management. [There, Bennis would hold the post of chairman of the Organizational Studies Department.] [7]

Career

Within the area of management, Bennis sought to move from theory to practice in 1967, taking the post of provost of the State University of New York at Buffalo and the presidency of the University of Cincinnati in 1971. He authored two books on leadership during his presidency: The Leaning Ivory Tower, 1973, and The Unconscious Conspiracy: Why Leaders Can’t Lead, 1976. [8]

Bennis chose to return to the life of a teacher, consultant and author following a heart attack in 1979, joining the faculty of the University of Southern California. Most of the best-known of his 27 books followed, including the bestselling Leaders and On Becoming A Leader, both translated into 21 languages. [9]An Invented Life was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. More recent books, Organizing Genius, 1997, Co-Leaders, 1999, and Managing The Dream, 2000, summarize Bennis’s interests in leadership, judgment, organizational change and creative collaboration. Geeks & Geezers, 2002, examines the differences and similarities between leaders thirty years and younger and leaders seventy years and older.[5][2]

Bennis spent time as an adviser to four United States presidents and several other public figures, and has also consulted for numerous FORTUNE 500 companies. [10]

He has also spent time on the faculties of Harvard and Boston University and taught at the Indian Institute of Management-Calcutta, INSEAD and IMD. In addition to his current posts at USC, Bennis serves as chairman of the Advisory Board of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University’s Kennedy School. He is a visiting professor of leadership at the University of Exeter (UK) and a senior fellow at UCLA’s School of Public Policy and Social Research.

Impact

Bennis’ impact on the fields of leadership and management theory is significant. The Wall Street Journal named him as one of the top ten most sought speakers on management in 1993; Forbes magazine referred to him as the “dean of leadership gurus” in 1996. The Financial Times referred to Bennis in 2000 as “the professor who established leadership as a respectable academic field.” In August, 2007, Business Week ranked Bennis as one of the top ten thought leaders in business. [11][12]

Bennis has been ranked as one of the top 30 Leadership professionals in the international Leadership Gurus survey for 2008. The “Leadership Gurus survey” award, by Global Gurus International identifies the top and most influential Leadership professionals in the world by merit and public voting.

2009年12月12日 星期六

Harriet Beecher Stowe (June 14, 1811 – July 1, 1896) was an Americanabolitionist and author. Stowe's novelUncle Tom's Cabin (1852) depicted life for African-Americans under slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the U.S. and Britain and made the political issues of the 1850s regarding slavery tangible to millions, energizing anti-slavery forces in the American North, while provoking widespread anger in the South. Upon meeting Stowe, Abraham Lincoln allegedly remarked, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!"[1]

2009年12月9日 星期三

The octogenarian filmmaker Agnès Varda

Varda has been a pioneer in the world of cinema since the 1950s. Today at the age of 81, she remains highly active.

Agnès Varda met her husband-to-be and fellow film-maker, the late Jacques Demy back in the 50s. Her autobiographical ‘Les Plages d’Agnès’ – released in English as ‘The Beaches of Agnes’ – won a César (the French equivalent of the Oscars) for best documentary earlier this year, and more recently, she has been experimenting with installations involving film, in exhibits at galleries in Lyons and Oporto.

Varda, Agnès (änyĕs' värdä') 1928-, French filmmaker, b. Brussels. She studied at the Sorbonne, École du Louvre, and a Paris photography school and began working as a theatrical photographer (1951-61) and photojournalist. Varda's first film, La Pointe Courte (1954), has been called the first work of France's cinematic new wave. Fiercely independent, she established a reputation for originality and feminist concerns in Cleo from 5 to 7 (1961), the "real-time" story of a pop star awaiting a crucial medical diagnosis. Since then, she has directed some 30 films (and written many of them), which often deal with themes of isolation and loneliness. Her best-known features include Happiness, (1965) The Creatures (1966), One Sings, the Other Doesn't (1977), Vagabond (1985), and Jane B. by Agnes V. (1987). Varda has also made documentaries, e.g., Black Panthers (1968), and two tributes (1991 and 1995) to her late husband, the director Jacques Demy.

Ikuo Hirayama, in front of his Silk Road works (ASAHI SHIMBUN FILE PHOTO)

Ikuo Hirayama, a Japanese-style painter famous for his Silk Road series of works as well as his efforts to protect cultural heritage sites in Japan and overseas, died of a stroke Wednesday. He was 79.

During his 60-year career, Hirayama painted people, landscapes, and historical and cultural assets in a distinctive style marked by glowing colors, based on precise sketches, and imbued with a sense of grandeur, romance and the vastness of time.

He received the Order of Culture in 1998.

Among his many roles, he served as president of the Tokyo National University of Arts and Music (now Tokyo University of the Arts), chairman of the Japan Art Institute and a UNESCO goodwill ambassador.

Hirayama was born in Hiroshima Prefecture in 1930 and, after surviving the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima city, grew ill at one time from a radiation-related illness. His experience of the cataclysmic attack apparently shaped his yearning for peace and respect for cultural heritage.

He studied Japanese painting under Seison Maeda at a predecessor of the arts university in Tokyo. He inherited Maeda's respect for the Orient, and valued traditional Japanese virtues.

Hirayama first received acclaim for a series of paintings based on Buddhist themes, such as "Bukkyo Denrai" (The Transmission of Buddhism) in 1959 and "Nyu-Nehan Genso" (Fantasy of Nirvana) in 1961.

His 1979 work "Hiroshima Shohen-zu" (The Holocaust of Hiroshima) avoids a direct portrayal of the atomic bombing, and depicts instead richly red flames that rise up to Acalanatha, a Buddhist deity who destroys delusion and rescues people.

But he is most famous for his paintings of Silk Road desert landscapes, people and history.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Hirayama took part in the restoration of the murals of Horyuji temple's main hall and of the ancient Takamatsuzuka tumulus.

He also contributed to the preservation and restoration of cultural heritage sites in several countries, such as the Angkor Wat ruins in Cambodia, the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan--much of which were blown up by the Taliban in 2001.

He also donated 200 million yen to protect a cave-temple in Dunhuang, China.

From 1973, Hirayama served as a professor at his alma mater, where he taught up-and-coming artists. He served as president from 1989 to 1995, and again from 2001 to 2005.

He received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding in 2001 and the Asahi Prize for fiscal 2003.

He was also chairman of the Japan-China Friendship Association, president of the Japan Scholarship Foundation and chairman of the Japanese National Commission for UNESCO.

Just as his lifelong passion, the Silk Road, connected the East and the West, Hirayama played a major role in connecting countries, sectors and peoples.(IHT/Asahi: December 3,2009)

A hibakusha, he produced a series of paintings depicting the introduction of Buddhism to Japan. Later, he portrayed the A-bomb attack on Hiroshima. He is also active in the preservation of the cultural heritage of the world (for example, the Bamiyan Buddhas) and is internationally appreciated for his efforts in this sphere. Hirayama was awarded the Order of Cultural Merit in 1998.